Sleek and dangerous Akantha is about six and a half feet long while in snake form. An Indian Cobra, the soft to darker brown scales and hooded ribs can both mesmerize and intimidate. As a humanoid, she is slender and as tall as most human males, retaining her scaly skin and reptilian eyes. While the extent of the human appearance among her kind ranges from the most minimal to the more reptilian like, she seems to favor more human features. However, like the rest of her people, her fangs and forked tongue are very much that of the snake's.

Personality:

Around her kind, Akantha is calm and relaxed. She does, however, hold very culture-centric notions. Her main concern is to ensure the safety and well being of her clan. To her, the Naga come first. Cautious around humans, she views them with a measure of distrust and dislikes the amount of dependency her people have towards them. This makes her seem distant and a tad bit too serious. However, she understand the benefits of the exchange, even if she is reluctant to follow through with it.

Biography:

Raised with the premise that the clan came first, Akantha had always viewed the humans with mild distrust and perhaps, even a seed of fear. As a result, she had always treated them with a certain amount of distance, reluctantly ensuring their safety if it meant the well-being of her kind.

Safety in exchange for food; it was an arrangement that had benefited both sides in equal measures.

In some ways, the humans were as much the outcasts as she was. Immigrants hiding underground, they lived with them, receiving protection from criminals in exchange for food and supplies. Thanks to this arrangement, her people no longer had to risk venturing to the surface and being discovered by more unsavory characters.

She could live with that exchange.

If Akantha could have had it her way, however, they would have left the Moscow underground some long years past. Unfortunately, reality was against her. They weren’t a large group, but they had some that were too young or too old to risk a journey that could expose them; and where would they go in any case? Like it or not, as some humans said, they were safest with the devil they knew than the one they did not.

Of late, things seemed to have become a bit more difficult for her people. The tunnels had grown more dangerous and causing more trouble than in the past. A few, like her friend Sato, had ventured out in search for answers. None of which had returned.

Three weeks had passed since Sato had left, days since he had been expected to have returned. Despite herself, unease crept under her scales and refused to be displaced.